Shameless!

When you come to think of it, flowering plants are blatantly sexual beings, showing off their reproductive organs for the world to see. And be tempted by, of course. That's the point.

Not only do the wasps and the bees fall for this, but even we humans harvest plant sexual structures to decorate our homes and our own selves.

My rhododendrons: no false modesty.A brief review, for those of us (like me) who forget the terminology too easily; the female part of the flower is the pistil, a tube (the style) which connects the stigma at the tip to the ovary at the bottom. The stigma has features which enable it to collect the pollen, whether from the same flower, another on the same plant or from a more distant plant.The stigma of a rhododendron. Somewhat suggestive of a lipsticked mouth.
I took a flower apart. This is the pistil, with the ovary (green) at the bottom. The style feels silky, like the petals, but the stigma and the ovary are sticky, and the ovary tastes sweet and a bit spicy.

The male organs are the stamens. These have a stalk (a filament) which supports a pollen-producing anther.
Rhododendron anthers, on their pale stalks. I don't see any pollen on them, like I do on other flowers; that may be because the pollen is so tiny. Or it may be that it is contained in those two tiny tubes, and shakes or shoots out when the flower is disturbed.*These rhododendrons, a separate variety, are much smaller. Some of the flowers on the plant are singles, others, like this one, are doubles. The stamen here is a deep pink all the way down, whereas the anthers are so pale that they are almost invisible in this photo.

The pistils and stamen of a rhododendron form a pathway for insects, leading into the centre of the flower, where I see the bees collecting that sticky, sweet nectar. I have noticed that they (the bees) go quickly from one flower to the next; they do not spend more than a few seconds on each. On other flower species, they sometimes spend quite a while in one place. It all has to do with the precise mechanism that the plant uses to get pollen from the anthers into the stigma, and whether or not the pollen must come from another blossom. I would guess that this is the case for these rhododendrons.**

One other thing to note about the flowering plants; it is no accident that we find them attractive. We are related, after all, to the birds and the bees that pollinate them, lured by seductive scents and brilliant colour.

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* and ** See next post.